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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Meaning and Purpose

Form

William Lane Craig's "The Absurdity of Life Without God" (Reasonable Faith, ch. 2), heard also from Tim Keller and Jordan B Peterson:

  1. If God does not exist, human life has no objective meaning, value, or purpose. The universe will end in heat death, every achievement will be erased, and nothing anyone does ultimately matters.
  2. But human life does have objective meaning, value, and purpose; or, in the pragmatic form, no one can live consistently as though it did not, and the atheist who tries borrows meaning from the theism he denies.
  3. Therefore God exists; or, at least, theism is the only view under which life is not absurd, and one should want it to be true.

My Positions

  1. It is an Appeal to Consequences. That a universe without ultimate meaning would be bleak has no bearing on whether that is the universe we are in. Craig half-concedes this: the chapter is offered as a reason to want theism, which is a motive, not an argument.
  2. I deny premise 2 in the form the argument needs. Meaning is made, not found. The absence of cosmic meaning is a problem only for someone who needs cosmic meaning (Meaning). Local meaning, in people, work, curiosity, and the brief chance to look at the universe, is the only meaning anyone has ever had, including every believer, whose actual life is also made of people and work and the view from the window.
  3. "Ultimately" is doing all the work. Nothing matters to the universe, which is not the sort of thing anything can matter to. Mattering is always mattering to someone. That a thing will end does not make it pointless while it lasts; a meal is not worthless because it is digested, and a life is not worthless because it stops. The heat death in 10^100 years is a non-sequitur dressed as an argument.
  4. Theism does not deliver what it offers. The purpose on offer is to glorify another being for eternity. Being somebody else's project is not obviously more meaningful than being one's own, and an infinite duration makes each act infinitely small, not infinitely important. The scriptural version, in which most of humanity is damned (Hell), is a purpose many people would find a reduction. The theist's "objective purpose" is assigned, which is what the argument claimed made life absurd.
  5. The empirical premise is false. The least religious societies on Earth are not in despair; reported meaning in life is driven by relationships, autonomy, and health, not by belief in a cosmic plan. The people who find life meaningless are usually depressed, not atheists, and the cure is not metaphysics.
  6. This is the Argument from Desire with the desire renamed. It separates the need from the remedy exactly as the other does, and it fails the same way: that people want their lives to matter forever is a fact about people (The human need for religion).

Sources

  • Craig, W. L., Reasonable Faith (3rd ed., 2008), ch. 2, "The Absurdity of Life Without God"
  • Camus, A., The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
  • Nagel, T., "The Absurd", Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971)
  • Russell, B., "A Free Man's Worship" (1903)
  • Wolf, S., Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010)
  • Metz, T., Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study (2013)

Also see